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Romanticism, Nature, Ecology Syllabus

Romanticism, Nature, Ecology

Dr. Gary HarrisonDepartment of EnglishUniversity of New Mexico

This colloquium will study the relationship between Romantic literature and the environment. Drawing upon a few key theoretical and literary works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as from key texts in contemporary ecological literary criticism, environmental literature, and philosophy, we will ask what constitutes environmental literature, how such literature shapes environmental consciousness and action, and how Romantic perspectives question the human place in the world, the relationship between human perception and the natural world, and our co-existence as human beings in the larger living organism of the earth. Rather than turn to Romanticism as a guide to current environmental practices, our interest will be in Romanticism as a cultural discourse that opens up conceptual, critical and poetic investigations about our relationship to the environment and as a site for the emergence of ecopoetics. As we move through our readings, we will also attend to the way Romantic discourse has helped to shape the discursive repertoire of environmental practices and perceptions today. Readings will include poetry by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare; non-fiction prose by Jean Jacques Rousseau and Dorothy Wordsworth; and philosophical, historical, and critical essays by Friedrich Schiller, Martin Heidegger, Aldo Leopold, Michel Serres, Donald Worster, and others. Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination will serve as a primary source for questions and concepts about environmental literature and ecocentrism that we will apply to our readings in British Romanticism; that book’s focus primarily upon American literature will create a cultural dissonance that should unsettle our perspective on British Romantic literature, providing a unique critical purchase on the history of
British environmental literature, while keeping us in sight of the concurrent history of American environmental literature.

Requirements will include writing several short exploratory essays; presenting a summary of, and leading discussion on, at least two of the critical works assigned for each day; and writing an article-length final paper, a synopsis of which you will present on the last day of class. Topics for your papers and presentations may include literary, scientific or philosophical works; contemporary literary criticism and theory; key texts in the history of ecological thought, ecocriticism, environmental ethics, or environmental perception; and the writers we will be discussing. You should confirm your final paper topic with me on or before the end of week twelve.

Unit III: Romantic Aesthetics and Nature
Week 4 The Beautiful and PicturesqueT: Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, Parts I and III; Kant, from Critique of Judgment, Part One, First Book, 1 – 13, 17R: Gilpin, from Three Essays on the PicturesqueCritical Works:Jonathan Bate, “The Picturesque Environment” (Chapter 5, Song of the Earth)Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature”
Week 5 The SublimeT: Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, Part IIR: Kant, from Critique of Judgment, Part One, Second Book, 23 – 29Critical Works:Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature”Christopher Hitt, “Toward an Ecological Sublime”
Week 6T: Schiller, On the Naïve and SentimentalR: Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads; Coleridge, from Chapters 4, 13, 14 of Biographia Literaria; from Lectures on Shakespeare “Mechanic and Organic”Critical Works:Lawrence Buell, “Representing the Environment” (Chapter 3, Environmental Imagination)Neal Evernden, “Talking about the Mountain” (Chapter 1, Natural Alien)